Flew out of Jo’burg today and up to our first border and customs crossing. Lots of paperwork to take the plane out of SA, and when we went through immigration, the computer crashed, so we had to wait 45 minutes for someone to reboot it. Modern technology at its best.
Cleared customs and fueled at Gaberone’s airport, simple and painless and such a breath of fresh air from South Africa. These people seem to own their own country. There’s no “fuck you back” officiousness, no subservience, just people getting on in life and looking forward to making their own future.
My friend Charlotte, a US citizen living in South Africa said, “When I leave South Africa and come here, I feel like I can start breathing again.”
On to the Kalahari.
Botswana is flat. I mean totally fucking flat. I think the biggest hill here is a couple of hundred feet up, and there are maybe 4 in the whole country. There are no visual references anywhere, the desert is totally homogenous, so I’m flying by headings and hoping we hit our airport.
Along the way, in the plane, we spotted a few elephant by a watering hole, but that’s it. Everything is hiding in the mid-day sun, except for mad dogs and former Englishmen.
Made it to camp, dumped our stuff in our tent, and went out for our first game drive. Plopped into a land rover and went looking for wildlife. Our first Impala siting was eventful. We were shouting, “Oh, wow, look! Impala!” and we stopped to take pictures. By the next morning, we were so sick of looking at Impala, we didn’t even bother to point them out. They’re the Mc Donald’s of Africa. Plentiful, cheap, and on every corner.
It’s dry here, really dry, but the temperature in the afternoons is warm. At night, it’s so cold that you almost can’t move. Keeping a fire going is essential. Luckily, it’s so dry and cold, no mosquitos can survive.
Met a couple of bushmen (it was an organized encounter). Had a great time “chatting” with them. They showed us how to find water in some tubers, how to start fires the old fashioned way, and other good desert survival skills. The government has limited the number of bushmen in the Kalahari to only 1000, but there are around 2500 total, and some of them want to continue to live the bushman experience, so there’s a bit of a silent protest going on. The issue seems complicated, so I have no opinion.